A Harley-Davidson with sport bike goodies either trips your trigger or crosses your wires, but in our case, it’s almost always the former. If it’s done right, there’s something plain badass about a Milwaukee missile that looks like 100 mph standing still, all without losing its leaky old iron character.
In terms of doing it right, it’s impossible to argue with this 1983 Harley-Davidson XR1000 with competition history in the Battle of the Twins. This rare racer is set to go across the block this week, as part of the Mecum Glendale auction.
Getting up to speed on this XR1000, you have to go all the way back to Harley’s sensational XR750 flat tracker, arguably one of the most successful race bikes ever built. After Harley worked the bugs out of the engine in 72, the XR750 was a dominant force in flat track racing for decades. The H-D loyal watched guys like Mert Lawill slide around the oval, and Evil Knievel launch over buses, and they couldn’t help but want a piece of the action.
While the majority of Harley’s resources were tied up in the construction of the upcoming Evolution engine, Harley’s skunkworks started modifying a regular 1000 cc XL Sportster to incorporate a bit of the XR750 flavor enthusiasts craved. The result was the 1983 XR1000.
In practice, it was little more than a XL Sportster with XR750-style cylinder heads, twin Dell’Orto carburetors and high-mounted pipes on the B-side. An XR750 for the street in theory, the XR1000 really shined on the big banks in the Battle of the Twins.
The series was born in the 1980s as a response to the increasing dominance of four-cylinders in sportbike racing, giving large displacement, air-cooled British, European and American bikes solace on pavement. Harley’s entries were the new XR1000 on paper, but could be more aptly described as overbored versions of the XRTT road racing bike.
The most successful of these entries was an unlikely hero known as Lucifer’s Hammer. After going up in flames at Daytona in 1973, the factory road racer was put into storage for 10 years before being reworked to race in the Battle of the Twins. Despite having little to no experience on pavement, flat track racer Gene Church piloted Lucifer’s Hammer to three Battle of the Twins championships.
In an iconic exchange, the Ducati factory team congratulated Church for hitting 156 mph at Daytona in 1986, but Church simply responded that something was up with one of the carburetors. Sounds like fancy talk—that is until they fixed the issue and topped 170 mph.
Lucifer’s Hammer is a well-documented machine, but the XR1000 offered here at Mecum’s Glendale auction is a bit more of a mystery. Mecum details that the bike was raced in the Battle of the Twins from 1983 to 1986, with Rick Ranno piloting. From there, it was sold to Sweden and raced by champion ice racer Posa Serenius at Linöping in 2007. Compared to the one period photo we were able to dig up, we’re assuming the bike has since been restored to Ranno’s V-Twins Cycle Shop livery.
Back in 2019, Mecum sold the Ranno XR for a paltry $6,600. For that kind of money, we should all be raising our paddles. [Via Mecum Auctions]
